'I said awful things to my pal when I thought she'd been disloyal - now I don't know how to fix it'

Dear Coleen

I hope you can help tell me the best way to apologise to a good friend who has basically cancelled me after I accused her of doing something, which it turns out she didn’t do.

A couple of weeks ago, I received quite a scary, ­aggressive message on social media from a woman telling me to back away from her boyfriend and saying she knew I’d been flirting with him.

The guy in question works with me and I do fancy him, but I’d never go there because I know he’s in a relationship. Anyway, the only person I’ve told about this guy is my friend, so I assumed she must have said something. It turns out it was the guy himself who told his ­girlfriend that I flirt with him!

I said some horrible things to my friend, calling her disloyal, backstabbing, jealous and so on. She hasn’t spoken to me since and I feel so upset and hate myself for jumping to the wrong conclusion.

I have been an idiot and want to make it up to her and rescue our friendship, but she won’t take my calls or reply to my messages either.

I can’t believe I’ve messed up so badly. What can I do?

Coleen says

Well, I think the only thing you can do is what you’re doing – telling her you miss her, you misjudged her and take full blame for it. And apologise for the things you said, too.

Explain that you didn’t think for a minute it’d be this guy who told his girlfriend because, why would he?

And you’d only told her you fancied him, so you assumed (wrongly) that she must have spilled the beans. If she won’t talk to you, then put it in an email. She might not reply, but she will read it.

If she can’t see past it and give you another chance, there’s no more you can do unfortunately. Maybe she just needs a bit of time to calm down and think about it again.

I know it’s frustrating, but you can’t control how she reacts or sees the situation. All you can do is explain things from your side and give her a ­meaningful apology.

But there’s a lesson in this for you not to be so quick in future to jump to conclusions.

If you had asked her instead of accusing her, there ­probably would have been a totally different outcome.